With an increased inclination toward cannabis products, the cannabis market in the United States has become highly competitive these days, leading to businesses struggling to build a decent online presence.
Under strict restrictions placed by Google and other search engines regarding cannabis advertising, only carefully thought-out organic SEO tactics, such as building niche edit backlinks, can save the day! Here’s a case study that shows you how.
In 2024, we took over improving the SEO metrics of a US-based client’s website. The client was a well-known online retail brand in the cannabis industry, and its entire business was conducted digitally.
So, a high online ranking was not just a good marketing strategy in this case but an absolute necessity! We implemented a cbd link building technique for a few months to improve the rankings quickly and found immense success. Our target keyword rankings showed significant improvement in an extremely short period.
Challenges Faced
Let's first understand our challenges before discussing how and what we achieved. Although our client had a well-established online presence, its sales plunged drastically.
According to our analysis, the primary cause was the lack of relevant organic traffic on the website, which could convert to viable customers. So, implementing an aggressive backlink-building strategy that ensured quality and authority was the key here. Hence, we set a few goals for ourselves to complete within 2 months, like:
- Rank under 10 for high-traffic, relevant cannabis keywords such as Delta 8 online, Delta 9 gummies, and Delta 9 THC gummies.
- Acquire 50 niche-relevant backlinks.
- Increase organic traffic to product pages by 100%
- Boost domain authority by 5 points
- Improve CTR by 15% for the top 5 keywords
- Gain 30 new referring domains
- Reduce bounce rate by 20%
Niche Edit Strategy
Since we faced stringent budget and time constraints, we implemented a niche-edit backlink-building strategy instead of traditional techniques, such as bookmarking and guest posting, which were expensive and required immense time to curate new content.
Here’s what we planned: Five weekly niche edit placements to ensure a consistent and positive website SEO impact. Our target was relevant, high-ranking content published by credible and authoritative cannabis websites, probably specific to the US market.
We found it better to stick to domains with ratings equal to or above 60. Sites with similar products to our client delivered promising results.
Implementation Process
To implement our niche link-building strategy, we sincerely followed these steps:
- Competitor Backlink Analysis: A thorough analysis of our competitors' backlinks helped us quickly shortlist the relevant content and domains where we can place our links and drive traffic back to our client’s website. We also got some insights into what kind of links to use.
- Identifying Target Websites: Besides analyzing the competitor’s backlinks, we searched for the target keywords on search engines. It helped us identify a few more credible websites to place our backlinks.
- Outreach and Negotiation: Our next step was approaching the website owners we had identified. To negotiate, we precisely outlined how our links were relevant to their business and product profiles and why placing our links could add value to their content.
Some advice: Professionally drafted emails are the best way to communicate the mutual SEO benefits of niche edit link techniques. - Contextual Link Placement: When we finalized our host, we used links that seemed naturally integrated and part of the content instead of appearing forced and out of place. This is also necessary to maintain the quality of the host content.
- Quality Assurance: Our job didn’t end with our backlinks going live. For months, we consistently monitored their performance on reliable tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs to ensure we received the amount and quality of traffic we initially aimed for. We also studied how this impacted the domain authority and ranking of the client's website.
Results
Here’s what we achieved with our planned niche edit link-building strategy for 2 months!
- For most of the target cannabis keywords, our client secured under 6 positions on Google.
- We acquired 70 high-quality, niche-relevant backlinks, which was 20 more than we had targeted.
- Organic traffic to most of the client’s product pages increased by 100%, while a few noted over 50% rise.
- The client's website's overall domain authority increased by 8 points, 3 points more than we aimed for.
- As we wanted, the click-through rates (CTRs) for the top five keywords increased by 15%, and the bounce rates for most keywords decreased by 25%.
- Our client gained 30 new referring domains within 2 months.
Why This Strategy Worked?
The niche edit worked great for us in the circumstances! We were handed a site with traffic but not relevant traffic that could be converted to potential customers. So, without wasting time curating additional new content for guest posting and bookmarking submissions, we started searching published content already ranking for our top target cannabis keywords.
Our negotiating skills worked wonders here! We approached the website and webpage owners to propose placing our links on each piece of content we had shortlisted. As a result, we successfully brought relevant traffic back to the client’s website without investing many resources.
